Cancer Immune Therapies from Glycoscience

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Carolyn Bertozzi, Ph.D., Baker Family Director, Sarafan ChEM-H, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences, professor of chemical & systems biology and radiology (by courtesy), department of chemistry, Stanford University; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

Complex sugars, which scientists call “glycans”, cover the surfaces of all living cells where they serve as a molecular barcode that reports on the health status of the cell. Cancer cells are known to undergo changes in the structures and abundances of certain glycans, most prominently those that include a sugar building block called “sialic acid”. Consequently, cancer cells have more sialic acids on their surface than healthy, normal cells. The Bertozzi Lab discovered that this dense thicket of sialic acids allows cancer cells to escape recognition by our immune system, which allows the cancer to grow and spread. This finding motivated them to develop a new kind of cancer immune therapy that functions as a “lawnmower”, cutting the disease sugars off of cancer cells so that the immune system can recognize them as diseased and kill them.

Carolyn Bertozzi is the Baker Family Director of Sarafan Stanford ChEM-H and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. She is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation and infection, and exploiting this information for development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, most recently in the area of immuno-oncology. Most recently she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and Welch Prize in Chemistry.

Open to

Tri-Institutional